Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
of a ton of limestone, not to mention a few other elements, vast quantities of water, more coal to power the railroads and barges that ferried minerals from the mines, and electricity (also produced from either coal or natural gas) to run the mills. Similar to the region’s other major corporations, Carnegie Steel and its subsidiary, Frick Coke Company, owned a number of so-called captive mines that were transferred to U.S. Steel at its founding in 1901. The Leith Mine & Coke Works in the Connellsville region, for example, began operation in the 1880s to produce coke for the Joliet Steel Company near Chicago. Frick bought the mine in 1889 and upgraded operations, building the first steel tipple in the region to hoist cars loaded with coal up the shaft and lower workers into the mine. Despite some geological characteristics that made it “a hard one to manage” according to one mine inspector, the Leith mine was easily connected to Homestead and the rest of Carnegie’s steel empire by both the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads. By the turn of the century, more than three hundred people worked in the mine and the adjacent coking facilities, producing nearly 120,000 tons of coke annually.3
As with iron and steel manufacturing, consolidation and vertical integration produced dramatic changes in the way coal was mined, particularly in large companies. Mine owners worked to replace what had been essentially underground workshops controlled by skilled miners with new management practices aimed at lowering costs and controlling the production process. Mines became much more hierarchical spaces, with individual workers forming parts of interdependent, coordinated, and carefully supervised groups. Standard practice throughout the region was to divide the actual extraction of coal among specialized workers, including cutters (operated mechanical cutting machines along the coal seam), loaders (loaded coal by shovel into mine cars), and shooters (used dynamite to blast coal from the front of the seam) as well as myriad assistants, helpers, and other subcategories. Animal or mechanically powered coal cars then hauled the coal to the mine shaft and up to the coal tipple where it was sorted and weighed by supervisors.4
Upon reaching the surface, coking coal, such as that produced at the Leith Mine, was processed in one of the “beehive” ovens dotting the area. Over 40,000 such ovens produced 18 million tons annually; this amounted to 60 percent of the nation’s coke produced in a region only fifty miles long and five miles wide. Workers loaded the coal and processed coke onto train cars and shipped them to blast furnaces that created raw or “pig” iron. For the Homestead Works, this initial process occurred in the Carrie Furnaces, across the Monongahela River in the mill town of Rankin, “a small bleak place,” according to one observer. Each day three hundred railroad cars of coal and coke, limestone, iron ore from the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, and other materials passed through the Carrie complex, which was dominated by the furnaces themselves—four steel behemoths more than two hundred feet high—each with the capacity to turn out sixty-five hundred tons of iron a day. Once there, the ore, coke, and limestone were hoisted to the top of the brick lined towers, while enormous stoves used coal to heat air to three thousand degrees and then blasted it into the bottom of the stacks. The downward movement of the ore, coke, and limestone, and the upward movement of hot gases refined the iron through a series of chemical reactions. Every three or four hours, workers extracted the molten iron from the furnace, as well as the heating process residue called slag.5
Even by the turn of the century, the dearth of flat land that forced both railroad lines and enormous mills to be located in the narrow river valleys required expensive and novel infrastructure to adapt the landscape to the needs of industry. From the Carrie Furnaces, for example, the molten iron was poured into huge cigar-shaped cars and went back across the river to the Homestead Works on a “hot metal bridge” that opened on New Year’s Eve, 1900. Once inside the mill, the iron was transferred to steel ladles and transported by enormous cranes to the open-hearth furnaces where it cooked in intense gas heat and hot air with a mixture of limestone and steel scrap. The men who worked at the tapping hole, where the steel flowed from the hearth into a giant ladle, wore thick protective coats, dark goggles, and heavy leather boots for protection from the intense heat. After the mixture had cooked for eight to ten hours depending on the type of steel needed, the skilled melter overseeing the process ordered a sample to be taken. If the molten metal was judged ready, workers used a long steel lance with a dynamite charge on the end to blow out the tapping hole and release the red hot metal. The slag floating on the surface was siphoned away leaving pure steel that was then poured into molds, where it solidified into ingots the size of a house.6
Once the raw steel cooled, workers reheated it until malleable and sent it to the primary mills where the ingots were rolled into semi-finished forms or to the forge division where they were crushed into shape by enormous presses on the way to becoming gun turrets, railroad axles, ship propeller shafts, and other finished products. From the primary mills, the steel shapes were taken to the finishing mills and rolled into plates, beams, pilings, or railroad wheels and sheared to the desired lengths. Workers then loaded finished products onto railroad cars or barges that traveled to consumers around the world. While it was only one of dozens of mills throughout the region, by the end of World War II the Homestead Works alone could churn out annually 2 million tons of pig iron; 4 million tons of steel ingots; 1 million tons of blooms; 2.7 million tons of slabs; 1 million tons of beams, pilings, and other structural products; 1.75 million tons of plates; 10,000 tons of forgings; 75,000 tons of wheels and other circular sections; 50,000 tons of axles; and 40,000 tons of fabricated products.7
Each step of the production process also produced solid, liquid, and airborne wastes that quickly found their way into the natural environment, including the bodies of workers and nearby residents. At the base of the production process, coal is composed of water, carbon, and smaller amounts of other materials, including hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. When mining disrupts natural groundwater systems, the interaction of water and air with coal generates sulfuric acid that is carried off through gravity drainage or pumped out of shafts. Because the Ohio River watershed is naturally alkaline, the region’s streams diluted pollution from early mining operations. As coal production increased in the late nineteenth century, however, the self-purification capacity of streams and major rivers was overwhelmed. Changes in water color revealed the first signs of acid degradation as streams became deep red or brown from the iron oxide. By 1900, several Ohio River tributaries, including the Monongahela and Youghiogheny that flowed near the Leith Mine were “usually acidic” and increasingly endangered aquatic life.8
But the most visible byproduct of the mining process in the Connellsville region was the smoke from the coke ovens. “It takes a fine summer morning to see what the … valley is like,” reported one resident. “Uniontown [is] sprawled in the flat in the foreground, Leith ovens smoking busily in the fields to the right … and the long ranks of Continental No. 1 ovens far away in the middle.”9 Coke production was a dirty business, with the frequent moving and handling of coal dispersing large amounts of dust. Furthermore, even a well-built beehive oven converted only 70 percent of each ton of coal into coke. This meant that the other 30 percent of suspended carbon particles, tars, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide escaped from the ovens in the form of smoke and noxious fumes. When workers doused the baked coal with water to stop the chemical process, the resulting steam lifted tiny coke particles into the air, while the used water containing coke residue, ammonia, and phenol drained into nearby streams. After World War I, as coke production moved from beehive ovens at the mine mouth to by-product ovens at the mills, the environmental effects of coke production moved from the rural periphery to the industrialized river valleys and U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works earned a reputation as one of the largest contributors to the region’s air pollution problems. “All that is left is this desolation,” declared Duquesne University biologist Emmanuel Sillman while standing on a barren hillside overlooking Clairton in 1971. “The killer is sulfur dioxide.”10
As imposing a presence as mines and mills were on the Steel Valley’s landscape, the railroad had an even more widespread, immediate, and intimate impact on the region’s residents. Transportation infrastructure was omnipresent, particularly in the narrow confines of the river valleys and central cities. “The railroads blanketed the city,” explained one recent study, “tunneling through the hills, bridging the rivers and ravines and usurping the riverbanks.” The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, was four-tracked throughout much